


Old School Ties

by DHW



Series: Kitty's Tearoom [2]
Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer (TV)
Genre: M/M, Suicide Attempt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-19
Updated: 2019-07-19
Packaged: 2020-07-08 21:26:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,915
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19876318
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DHW/pseuds/DHW
Summary: "I remember how my time at Oxford ended. "Written for Summer_of_Giles 2019[Please be advised that this story contains a non-detailed reference to a suicide attempt].





	Old School Ties

I remember how my time at Oxford ended. 

I was sent down shortly before my twenty-first birthday. Rusticated. Oxford’s dreaming spires no longer quite so welcoming as they had once been, at least for the foreseeable. I would be allowed to return in one year, provided my ‘i’s were crossed, my ‘t’s dotted, and all my ‘p’s and ‘q’s fully minded. Apology in writing, writing in hand, and hand reaching out towards the Master with a somewhat supplicant attitude. 

I’d say it was all Ethan’s fault, but that wasn’t really true. He merely set me on that particular path; it was my own two feet that carried me merrily along it. There is no-one to blame but myself. 

But, the thing is, I’m not entirely sure that I’m sorry. Not for Ethan. Not for how it began. 

I met Ethan half way through my first year at Balliol. 

I’d been invited to a party by an acquaintance from school. The boy’s name was Peter Devereux. We had never been particularly close. Our fathers had been as thick as thieves when they had attended St. Jerome’s. Neither of us were particularly like our fathers, and the disposition to particular friendships is not genetic. We were friendly, which was a damn sight more than could be said of the relationships between myself and the other boys I had been blessed to share a dormitory with, but nothing further.

Peter lived across the quad, in a pokey little room with uneven floorboards and a door that squeaked when it swung open. It was not too dissimilar to my own, except the pipes didn’t rattle when you opened the hot tap too quickly. 

Most of the boys sent to St. J’s found themselves walking the cobbled streets of Oxford or Cambridge (or God forbid, Durham) sooner or later. Though destined for the Watcher’s Council rather than the obligatory ‘Great Things’ expected of their fellow public school boys, the Council felt it their duty to ensure those who attended St. Jerome’s, and its sister school, St. Catherine’s, achieved a solid and varied education before the shackles snapped shut. 

I was late. And whilst it doesn’t do to be on time to such things, there is a certain grace period in which one can arrive without causing offence. It was 10pm. The party had begun at 8pm. If it had not been for the thought that my failure to attend after such a gracious invitation would somehow get back to my mother, our relationship already strained, then I would have remained in my room. As I had done most nights since my arrival in Oxford. 

Peter’s room smelt of smoke and bad beer. There was a crowd of at least fifteen, all crammed into the tiny lodgings. Every available flat surface played host to a bevy of denim or corduroy clad behinds, and those unfortunate enough to have been left even without an inadequate place to sit stood on the threadbare rug, rocking slightly upon the uneven floorboards. The noise was colossal. Shouting, laughter, and beneath it all, the psychedelic strains of Cream from the largely ignored record player. 

Un-eager as ever to make friends, I hovered awkwardly by the door and fished in my trouser pockets for the last of my cigarettes and a lighter. And, like the worlds worst magician, I magicked only one of the above from my pocket: a particularly battered example of a Marlbro. The lighter, it seemed, had vanished into thin air. Or possibly the hole in my left-hand pocket. 

The anguish at the thought of a night spent nicotine-less must have shown on my face, as less than a minute after I had made my discovery, I heard the words, ‘Need a light?’ over the din. I turned to look at my saviour: a floppy haired public school boy with little else to distinguish him from the rest of the floppy haired public school boy crowd present. Dark hair, dark eyes, and a slightly wolfish grin. 

‘Please.’

‘Ethan,’ he said, holding out the lighter, flame dancing. 

I leant towards it, waited for the end to catch, and then with a nod of thanks replied, ‘Rupert.’ 

‘How do you know Peter?’ he asked. 

I look a long drag from the cigarette before offering it to Ethan. He took it with little hesitation. 

‘We were at St Jerome’s together.’

His eyebrows rose in surprise. I knew why. It was the same reason the boys at school had given me such a wide berth. The braying public school boy was a mould I simply didn’t fit. I was the son of a baker, rather than a banker, and the fact that my Father had not worked at the family tearoom in decades did not seem to matter. His admittedly short-lived career as a Watcher had not been enough to save me from ridicule. 

‘A scholarship boy?’ he said, swiping a beer from the sink on the wall beside us. With an impressive slight of hand I couldn’t quite follow (back then, before I had got to know him, I could only assume he kept a bottle opener up his sleeve), he popped the metal top and offered me the bottle. 

I took it. ‘No.’

His eyebrows rose further, and a slow smile started to tug at the edges of his lips. They were full and rather more tempting that I would have liked to admit. I watched as he took another long drag from the cigarette held between them. 

‘Really?’ he said, blowing smoke towards the ceiling. 

‘And what of it?’

‘Nothing,’ he said. He offered me the cigarette. I offered him the beer. We swapped. “It’s just not what I expected.” 

‘And what about you? Harrow? Eton? Dulwich?’

‘Nothing so impressive as all that. Minor public school, I’m afraid. To borrow a tired old phrase.’

I snorted. 

‘A tired old phrase for a tired Old Boy.’

The cigarette was exchanged for beer once more. I fancied I could taste his lips upon the bottle. It felt a little like trading kisses, the meeting of our mouths occurring by proxy through glass and filter paper. 

‘It’s all the partying,“ he said. ”Really takes it out of one.’

‘I wouldn’t know.’

I watched as a mischievous glint entered his eye The grin that had seemingly taken up permanent residence on his face widened. Wolfish was most definitely the word. I felt a little like red riding hood. If, that is, Red Riding Hood had been a six-foot-odd, nineteen-year-old bruiser from West Hampstead. And the wolf a toothy Harry Houdini. 

‘I think that’s something we ought to rectify, then. Don’t you?’ he said, another beer bottle appearing in his hands, as if by magic.

And like that, we became friends. 

The rest of the party was a dud. It fizzled out sometime before midnight, all but a few leaving for bed (either their own or someone else’s). I spoke to Peter briefly, if only to ensure I had been Seen, and a few of the other chaps that breezed by on their way to the loos. But it was Ethan that held my attention that evening. Ethan’s bed I went back to. Ethan the boy I thoroughly buggered that night, and continued to bugger on a relatively frequent basis. 

Our friendship had a significant number of benefits, if you catch my drift*. 

*here read: sex, beer, and the occasional line of cocaine.

Not that there weren’t downsides. For a brief and irritating period during my second year, Ethan acquired a girlfriend. Her name was Eloise Bowes-Fox, and she was at Somerville reading History. Nice girl. Attractive in that horsey kind of way girls from Money (capital and all) tended to be. It was at his father’s behest, Ethan had said when I had pushed. Or, more accurately, shouted. 

Eloise’s mother, or rather more her mother’s family, owned vast swathes of Shropshire. Ethan’s father seemed to hold somewhat medieval beliefs about marriage. Mostly, that it wasn't worth bothering with if it didn’t come with some form of monetary incentive. And Ethan, for all his pillow talk of anarchy and sticking it to ‘The Man’, couldn’t quite bring himself to cast off his upper middle class yearnings. Like father like son. Or something of that general approximation. 

The relationship didn’t last longer than Michaelmas term. By Christmas, he was back in my bed, feeling very sorry for himself. A broken ego, rather than heart. There were no further experiments in the relationship department after that.

However, that is not to say that we didn’t experiment.

Not with a relationship, obviously. Things were already complicated enough between us after Eloise, and technically our bedroom habits bordered upon the illegal, given the pair of us had yet to reach our twenty-first birthdays. We thought it best to keep it under our hats. Or perhaps that should be under the bed covers? 

No. We experimented with sex and magic. Often together. Which is how it all began, really. How Oxford ended. 

Ethan was a magician. A good one. Not the rabbit out of a top hat type, though that particular trick was part of his party repertoire, but a real magician with real magic; the type of magic that came out of dusty old books and required chalk circles and candles and incantations. The type that summoned demons. 

I had learnt a little about magic at St Jerome’s. Watchers, on the whole, were expected to know the basics of the Occult Arts. Summoning spells, minor jinxes, charms of protection, perhaps even the odd hex here and there. Whilst I considered myself somewhat proficient when it came to sorcery, I was nothing in comparison to Ethan. He could summon something from nothing with no more effort than the wave of a hand. Bend his surroundings to his will with words. He could even raise the dead.

Slowly, over the course of my third and final year at Oxford, he taught me the ins and outs of magic and its mastery. Taught me about power and chaos, and how one can be used to feed the other. Taught me that sex can be used as a vehicle for more than simple pleasure. 

On sunday afternoons, we’d fuck in chalk circles and pentagrams, strung out on whatever Ethan had managed to score from the dealer who lived three floors below, surrounded by candles or incense. We’d bring each other to breaking point, use our hands and our lips until we left each other taut and shaking. That energy, that potential, would be enough to set things in motion, allowing us to summon anything and everything. And the high… Oh, the high. It would be enough to send us soaring like coke never could. The lows, however…

They were something else. All consuming. Seemingly endless. They were days where you wished for death if only to end the feeling of emptiness the high had left. Days where you begged the sun not to rise because, if it did, it meant you hadn’t died in the night. 

Days where you found yourself at the top of one of Oxford’s dreaming spires, waiting for your nightmare to end. Waiting for the world to come rushing up to meet you. Waiting for the darkness to come and blot out your own. 

I remember the spire. I remember the wind in my hair. And Ethan. I remember Ethan, his hand outstretched, reaching for me. 

Oxford ended with Ethan, his hand in mine.


End file.
